Matthew Yglesias

Here's the McCain campaign, as approvingly quoted by Byron York at the Corner: While Barack Obama took a premature victory lap today in the heart of Berlin, proclaiming himself a "citizen of the world," John McCain continued to make his case to the American citizens who will decide this election. And of course there's John at Powerline reviewing the speech and observing: There were, of course, problematic parts, like introducing himself as a "citizen of the… More »

Bill O'Reilly: "It is not a stretch to say that MoveOn is the new Klan." Here, for reference, is the kind of thing the Klan used to do: MoveOn, by contrast, is currently touting a petition calling on politicians to boost America's use of alternative energy as a method of generating electricity. Chris Hayes' excellent article on MoveOn at ten years old makes clear, these efforts to marginalize MoveOn by painting it as an unhinged radical outfit are both extremely… More »

Jonathan Martin has a very interesting article in Politico about the huge capabilities gap between left-leaning and right-leaning new media in terms of doing reporting and the impact that this is having on the campaign trail. There's no equivalent on the right to what's being done at TPM Media or Think Progress or the Washington Independent or the Huffington Post in terms of finding new campaign stories and pushing them. There's plenty of commentary on the left,… More »

At long last the US government is going to succumb to pressure mounted by Ted Kennedy and others to get more generous in our treatment of Iraqi refugees whose lives have been endangered by our adventure in their country. More »

Richard Kahlenberg responds on the school integration issue with several points, including most notably that (a) many poor students aren't in big city schools, and (b) school district boundaries are created by state legislatures not by God. On point (a), I'd need to see more information. Point (a) is well-taken. I'd need to see a more detailed analysis, though, to really understand how much good playing around with district lines can do. It's one thing to fold… More »

I was interviewed briefly as part of Shedrine Tadros's excellent piece for Al-Jazeera English on how blogs and the web are impacting the 2008 campaign: And, yes, this does mean I'm a terrorist. More »

As you may have heard, the McCain campaign's been having some surrogate trouble lately with folks like Carly Fiorina saying that McCain favors "fully funding" No Child Left Behind (i.e., appropriating a level of federal funding under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that's as high as the authorized funding level) even though that doesn't reflect his voting record or his formal campaign promises. Education adviser Lisa Graham Keegan tried to square the… More »

After goading Barack Obama into taking a trip abroad, John McCain's spent all day mocking Obama for being abroad and in the course of it he's gotten into an awful lot of nonsense: "I would rather speak at a rally or a political gathering any place outside of the country after I am president of the United States," McCain told O'Donnell. "But that's a judgment that Sen. Obama and the American people will make."However, on June 20, McCain himself gave a speech in… More »

Washington, DC is in need of a new transportation commissioner, and Greater Greater Washington is looking for signatures on a letter urging Mayor Fenty to find a visionary like New York City's Jeanette Sadik-Kahn. I signed. More »

Catherine notes that while hitting a pedestrian with a car in this city nets you just a $50 fine, biking the wrong way on a one-way street gets a $25 fine. That's madness. Cyclists probably shouldn't bike in the wrong direction (though the particular block where the tickets were handed out is an odd case where they should probably implement a special "wrong way" bike lane) but those who do so aren't endangering anyone but themselves. Conservative pundits who ram… More »

Via Tyler Cowen, new research from Ottaviano and Peri: Using our estimates and Census data we find that immigration (1990-2006) had small negative effects in the short run on native workers with no high school degree (-0.7%) and on average wages (-0.4%) while it had small positive effects on native workers with no high school degree (+0.3%) and on average native wages (+0.6%) in the long run. These results are perfectly in line with the estimated aggregate… More »

A little while back I was getting very excited about racial and economic integration plans as a way to improve school performance. Evidence suggests that kids do better in integrated schools, and a lot of cities have come up with clever schemes to ensure a reasonable degree of integration. The trouble, as Sara explained to me, is that given the actual patterns of residency in the United States an extremely large proportion of poor and minority students live in… More »

Robert Wright and Jim Pinkerton raise an important issue -- it's very clear from the record that John McCain strongly supported the dispatch of additional troops to Iraq, but it's not at all clear that he supported the suite of counterinsurgency tactics that he now wants us to believe is what the term "the surge" refers to. Indeed, the basic shape of the Anbar Awakening -- talk to your enemies, make concessions to bad guys to get them out of the terrorism business,… More »

New VoteVets ad takes on John McCain's new line that we don't need to listen to the Iraqi government when deciding whether or not our troops will be in Iraq: The thing missing here is that the necessity of leaving if asked used to be totally uncontroversial. McCain and everyone else you can care to name have been on the record for years about this. More »

When I found out that the Center for a New American Security had a project under way called the "Phoenix Initiative" I was naturally concerned. Is the Democratic Party foreign policy establishment really so crazy as to call for the destruction of the star D'Bari despite the inevitable conflict that will cause with the Shi'ar Empire? Call me an appeaser if you must, but that doesn't sound like a very good idea to me. The good news is that based on their report,… More »

Eric Alterman says: p.s. I saw The Dark Knight yesterday afternoon, and I think it pulled off the neat trick of being both libertarian and fascistic, which is to say it is damn confused ... not bad, but not consistent either. I'm not entirely sure that's right for reasons I'll go into in the spoiler-filled section of the post left below the fold. But for starters let me say that I think that a well-made film that, rather than being topical as such, instead… More »

I'm a pretty regular Morning Joe watcher as it happens, and I even caught some of yesterday's broadcast. But I missed the part where Joe Scarborough made a ludicrous defense of John McCain screwing up the chronology of events in Iraq and then launched into an unhinged attack on, well, me and my friends: Also during this segment, Scarborough attacked liberal bloggers for correcting McCain’s error, saying they were probably “just sitting there, eating their… More »

... John McCain's big criticism of Barack Obama was that he didn't take enough foreign trips -- especially to Iraq -- and how he hadn't been adequately tested on this big stage of CODELing. What happened to that? Now the critique is that too many Germans are interested in hearing him talk since, I guess, all else being equal we'd rather have a president foreigners find repugnant. But seriously, what's next? John McCain swore up and down that if Obama went to Iraq… More »

It's more bad news for Barack Obama as an MSNBC poll shows him maintaining a six point lead over John McCain in a political climate when he should be leading by sixty points. Another couple of months of this consistently beating his opponent, and Obama's really going to be in panic mode! Interestingly, "Obama’s lead over McCain expands to 13 points when third-party candidates Ralph Nader and Bob Barr are added into the mix -- with Obama at 48 percent, McCain at… More »

So John McCain said the surge led to the Anbar Awakening even though the Awakening, in fact, happened before the surge began. So he's ignorant. Or maybe dishonest. But now we learn he's also rather stubborn: McCain asserted he knew that and didn't commit a gaffe. "A surge is really a counterinsurgency made up of a number of components. ... I'm not sure people understand that 'surge' is part of a counterinsurgency." Shawn Brimley tries to bring common sense to… More »